Behind the Façades in France: What expats and the mainstream media (French and American alike) fail to notice (or fail to tell you) about French attitudes, principles, values, and official positions…

Monday, November 09, 2015

Everyone knows that no fault divorce is required to liberate women from being trapped in commitment; Yet change the context to the cost of broken families, and suddenly everyone knows that men are running away from commitment

Everyone knows that traditional marriage is a cruel
institution that “traps” women in commitment, depriving them of the
romantic love their noble hearts desire

Everyone knows that no fault divorce is required to liberate women from being trapped in commitment.

Modern women’s enthusiasm for divorce is hardly a well kept
secret. [Not all modern women view divorce as empowerment, but a large enough majority does feel this way, which is why divorce empowerment is ubiquitous in entertainment aimed at women.] If you are looking at media aimed to women, divorce
empowerment is a staple. This is quite literally a shameless
obsession. As new commenter Anna mentioned recently:

It’s crazy that every time that I find an article about
marriage, it’s either about the actual wedding or divorce. As a 26 year
old woman that has been married for 6 years, I’m well aware of the
pressure for divorcing. There’s always a “5 ways to know that your
marriage is over”. This is how I found your website and it all makes so
much sense, even though I’m not a christian. I have no idea why society
is leaning towards destroying its foundations.

Yet change the context to the cost of broken families, and suddenly everyone knows
that men are running away from commitment. This is especially
important when it comes to conservative backing for child support. In
2005 Phyllis Schlafly laid out what should be the standard conservative
position on a government program designed to destroy families in Federal Incentives Make Children Fatherless:

The federal incentives drive the system. The more
divorces, and the higher the child-support guidelines are set and
enforced (no matter how unreasonable), the more money the state
bureaucracy collects from the feds.

Follow the money. The less time that non-custodial parents (usually
fathers) are permitted to be with their children, the more child support
they must pay into the state fund, and the higher the federal bonus to
the states for collecting the money.

The states have powerful incentives to separate fathers from their
children, to give near-total custody to mothers, to maintain the
fathers’ high-level support obligations even if their income is
drastically reduced, and to hang onto the father’s payments as long as
possible before paying them out to the mothers…

We can no longer ignore how taxpayers’ money is incentivizing divorce
and creating fatherless children. Nor can we ignore the government’s
complicity in the predictable social costs that result from more than 17
million children growing up without their fathers.

Yet Schlafly is an extreme outlier among conservatives on this
topic. Conservatives are the strongest backers of the child support
system, and this is due to a deeply held belief that broken families are
caused by men who aren’t willing to stick around and raise their kids.
This belief is so strong that conservatives end up taking very
unconservative positions on the family. Instead of opposing a law that
creates perverse incentives to break up families, they enthusiastically
support it. Instead of supporting marriage, they support the system
designed to replace marriage. Instead of supporting an incentive based
structure for production, they are wedded to a crushing soviet style quota system that discourages hard work.